After $9 million a _year_ you can't honestly say that the person in question is generating enough raw wealth to be 'worth' it
They are "worth it" if someone is willing to pay them that.
They're just able to obtain it through a combination manipulation of the political system, military power and indoctrination of the working class
Or perhaps because they built a better search engine, or invented a new kind of anti-cancer drug, or did any of a large number of other things that benefit society to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions per year.
The super rich didn't 'earn' their wealth. They the gov't to obtain and maintain it. You can argue they shouldn't be allowed to do this, but you can't stop them from doing it.
There are super-rich who manipulate government into giving them vast amounts of money. And you know why they can do it? Because of people like you, people who want high taxes and strong regulations, the two primary mechanisms by which government engages in crony capitalism.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Gov't is a tool. The rich are going to use it to their advantage. The only question is, are you?
The real question is: why do people like you pretend to oppose this and then do everything in their power to support it?
you increase the top earner's rates on income over a certain amount. In the 50s and 60s we had the highest growth in real wages and middle class incomes the country (maybe even the species) has ever seen with a 90% top tax bracket. How?
Ah, yes, if only such a simplistic correlation analysis could in fact establish causation.
As I was saying: using the term "whore" doesn't mean that someone is a sexist; it's just a gender-appropriate insult.
And my point is that this is even more batshit crazy than donglegate. Donglegate at least involved a public space. This involves a private message between two individuals. Publishing such a message and making a big deal out of it is not only completely unprofessional on her part, it may actually be illegal in some jurisdictions.
Then open Medicare the way the NHS in the UK is done, have it covered by taxes and make it free at the point of service. Don't sell it, just have everyone covered without conditions.
At what level of coverage? Does everybody get the latest stem cell therapy? Cancer treatments that have a 1:10 chance of working? Robotic replacement limbs? Who decides who gets what? Why should I be forced to pay for insurance that I neither want nor need? Why shouldn't you be forced to pay extra if you are obese or smoke?
The police dept doesn't require that you "sign up" before they'll respond to a 911 call, the fire dept doesn't require forms filled out before they'll respond to a fire, why do we require this for health care?
As you may notice, police and fire departments have been causing huge financial problems for cities around the country, and that's providing services that are nowhere near as expensive as medical services. And they have started charging for their services too.
For some reason people want health care that won't bankrupt them. They look at what citizens of other industrialized nations get and want the same.
The reality of health care in many other nations is spiraling costs, health care rationing, and long waiting times. It's people buying expensive supplemental insurance to escape public health care systems. Some industrialized nations still have mostly private health care delivery and fee for service.
In reality, it makes very little difference for health care and outcomes what kind of health care system we have. The only difference is how much money insurance companies and doctors can suck out of people's pockets, and Obamacare does little to reduce that.
No, they don't, because the supply of medical professionals has been artificially limited and the market is highly regulated. But that's true for many professions, from longshoremen to lawyers. Everything from unions to the AMA sees to it.
Well, the Biology Online editor seems to have had a problem with politeness and professionalism. But it's also not particularly professional to post E-mails publicly and use them for a rallying cry for feminism in the sciences. The "science blogosphere" is not science, and who knows why the editor wrote what he wrote; maybe he (?) was just having a bad day. Professionalism and tolerance also means developing a thick skin and ignoring the occasional unprofessional behavior of others. I think everybody comes across as unprofessional and unpleasant in that exchange.
That is the basis of the proprietary technology Carlsson offers through his start-up venture, Ayasdi, which produces a compressed representation of high dimensional data in smaller bits, similar to a map of London’s tube system.
The first place to look when people make such claims is at their publications, neither Gunnar Carlsson nor Simon DeDeo have significant publications that show that their approach works on real data or standard test sets. The statements in the article that these kinds of approaches are new are also bogus (I don't know whether they are deceptive or ignorant).
Lastly, from a Stanford math professor, I would expect better citation statistics overall; I don't know what's going on there.
In the US for example, speech isn't 100% free. If something damages somebody's reputation, you better be able to show that you believed it was true or you're on the hook for libel or slander.
That doesn't have much to do with "free speech" per se; there are many ways in the US that saying the wrong thing can cost you money. Just like anything else, if you harm someone without cause or justification, they can recover damages from you. That isn't automatically an infringement of free speech rights. The major factor that makes speech non-free in Europe is the various restrictions on speech in European criminal law. You can face fines or prison in Europe for something you say even though no individual can necessarily demonstrate specific harm or damages, on the theory that some speech is intrinsically undesirable for society.
But civil law can also create restrictions on free speech if it creates such legal uncertainty that it causes people to interfere with legitimate free speech. The question is: will the civil law interfere with legitimate criticism. In the US, civil liability works in such a way that it doesn't do so; you only face liability if you deliberately and maliciously harm someone else. In Europe, you can face liability even for legitimate criticism, and now, even third parties may face liability for such criticism and be used as aids in restricting legitimate free speech.
It doesn't help you figure out which room is triggering an alarm. So if I shut it off because of smoke in the kitchen but there's also smoke somewhere else, I'll never know...
You're deaf? I mean, the other alarm will keep going.
I don't think you are grasping the advances the Nest has made in the most common interaction scenarios people have with detectors, which are plain and clear.
I don't have interaction with my detectors, except for replacing them every 5-10 years, which is faster than changing a light bulb.
I want your grandma to have adaptive cruise control and lane-holding systems to make her less likely to run me over on my motorbike. I want my girlfriend to have a parallel park system so she don't use your bumpers to find out when she's backed up too far.
I'm not so sure about that. People get better through practice. While that lane holding system keeps grandma on track most of the time, without practice, she may then completely fall apart when she can't use it. And your girlfriend may be less likely to harm a bumper when parking, but she may end up blocking the parking garage exit because she can't figure out how to get her car pointed the right direction. The more you automate simple tasks, the more you deprive people of being able to practice in simple situations that they can actually still handle. And while for many skills that may not matter, for driving I think it does.
This is nonsense. Parking, especially parallel parking, is a skill that has very little to do with normal driving.... Parking is about undestanding how the car moves at low speeds and especially in reverse and how to combine a number of moves to move the car sideways.
That's exactly what it's about. And you must know how to do that. Sooner or later, you'll have to back up through a narrow passage to make room for an emergency vehicle or because your way is blocked. It doesn't happen frequently but it does happen. In different words, if you aren't able to easily back out of wherever you drove in, you shouldn't be driving at all. And the skills you require for backing out are pretty much the same skills you require for parallel parking.
That utopia hasn't worked out too well. They figured out how to get licenses anyway
You're mistaken about what licenses can and should accomplish. They are not a perfect indicator of people's ability to drive, they are merely a simple check to weed out some fraction of people who obviously shouldn't be on the road right now.
If you want recognition for your driving skills enter a race; the rest of us only care that your vehicle doesn't do something harmful.
That's all I care about too. For example, you may get stuck in a narrow one-way street and have to back out of it. You may need to merge into a slowly moving tight stream of traffic. There are a lot of situations that are enough like parking that if you can't park you can't do them well, and where you end up creating a hassle or a hazard for other people. So, if you automate parking, you give people the illusion that they are prepared for traffic even though they aren't.
The problem isn't that there is anything wrong with automating parking per se, it's that the ability to park (parallel or otherwise) is one important indicator of your road-readiness.
And obvious response, but not quite right. Arguably, if you lack the skills to park, you shouldn't be driving in the first place. In different words, self-parking is fine when it goes with self-driving cars, but it isn't fine when it goes with drivers that are expected to be able to drive in complex and tight situations.
As houses become more tightly sealed and more stuff becomes propane powered, it's important to have this warning. Most people have propane water heaters, many have propane stoves.
Propane is used in RVs and trailers; regular homes use natural gas, which is mostly methane. The big gas heaters usually go in the garage (where you can put one CO detector, mostly for the car). If you manage to kill yourself with CO from burning methane, I think you deserve an entry in the record books. The thing you have to worry about with natural gas is leaks, but you smell those.
That's where you are wrong. It doesn't NEED to search for problems, because common problems exist for countless people: 1) Which detector is triggering for (battery / smoke / whatever)? 2) How do I disable false alarms?
Check Home Depot. You can get a talking smoke/CO detector (if you really think you need the CO) for $30. You disable it by pushing the big fat button right in the middle. These days, smoke detectors are as simply as buying it, sticking it to the ceiling, and replacing it every 10 years. The Nest, with its requirement for wiring and WiFi setup seems needlessly complicated (and also needs replacement every 10 years).
I don't need to read about it, I have actually been insured in several European systems over the years.
In short, you're speaking from ignorance and you're full of sh*t, as usual.
They are "worth it" if someone is willing to pay them that.
Or perhaps because they built a better search engine, or invented a new kind of anti-cancer drug, or did any of a large number of other things that benefit society to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions per year.
There are super-rich who manipulate government into giving them vast amounts of money. And you know why they can do it? Because of people like you, people who want high taxes and strong regulations, the two primary mechanisms by which government engages in crony capitalism.
The real question is: why do people like you pretend to oppose this and then do everything in their power to support it?
And that's a good thing because... ?
Ah, yes, if only such a simplistic correlation analysis could in fact establish causation.
As I was saying: using the term "whore" doesn't mean that someone is a sexist; it's just a gender-appropriate insult.
And my point is that this is even more batshit crazy than donglegate. Donglegate at least involved a public space. This involves a private message between two individuals. Publishing such a message and making a big deal out of it is not only completely unprofessional on her part, it may actually be illegal in some jurisdictions.
At what level of coverage? Does everybody get the latest stem cell therapy? Cancer treatments that have a 1:10 chance of working? Robotic replacement limbs? Who decides who gets what? Why should I be forced to pay for insurance that I neither want nor need? Why shouldn't you be forced to pay extra if you are obese or smoke?
As you may notice, police and fire departments have been causing huge financial problems for cities around the country, and that's providing services that are nowhere near as expensive as medical services. And they have started charging for their services too.
The reality of health care in many other nations is spiraling costs, health care rationing, and long waiting times. It's people buying expensive supplemental insurance to escape public health care systems. Some industrialized nations still have mostly private health care delivery and fee for service.
In reality, it makes very little difference for health care and outcomes what kind of health care system we have. The only difference is how much money insurance companies and doctors can suck out of people's pockets, and Obamacare does little to reduce that.
No, they don't, because the supply of medical professionals has been artificially limited and the market is highly regulated. But that's true for many professions, from longshoremen to lawyers. Everything from unions to the AMA sees to it.
If you're destitute, you're already covered by Medicaid.
The problem with opening Medicare is that it is in effect heavily subsidized and there is no good way of pricing it.
If he had tried to be rude to a guy, he would have used a term like "limp-dicked pussy" or something like that.
The fact that people use gender-appropriate insults doesn't automatically make them sexist.
Well, the Biology Online editor seems to have had a problem with politeness and professionalism. But it's also not particularly professional to post E-mails publicly and use them for a rallying cry for feminism in the sciences. The "science blogosphere" is not science, and who knows why the editor wrote what he wrote; maybe he (?) was just having a bad day. Professionalism and tolerance also means developing a thick skin and ignoring the occasional unprofessional behavior of others. I think everybody comes across as unprofessional and unpleasant in that exchange.
No, I'm judging the work by the absence of relevant peer reviewed, high impact publications, and the lack of experiments on large data sets.
(My comment on the relatively low h-index was merely an aside.)
How does a project web page make up for the lack of relevant peer reviewed publications or lack of citations?
Where are the published results on real-world data sets? Or do you believe that a lot of verbiage is sufficient?
The whole article is just a sales job:
The first place to look when people make such claims is at their publications, neither Gunnar Carlsson nor Simon DeDeo have significant publications that show that their approach works on real data or standard test sets. The statements in the article that these kinds of approaches are new are also bogus (I don't know whether they are deceptive or ignorant).
Lastly, from a Stanford math professor, I would expect better citation statistics overall; I don't know what's going on there.
http://scholar.google.de/citations?user=nCGwiu0AAAAJ&hl=en
http://scholar.google.de/scholar?as_ylo=2009&q=author:%22gunnar+carlsson%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
You can't learn "lessons" from a fictional story because it doesn't actually reflect reality; it reflects the fears and opinions of its author.
If you read a book written by a Luddite, you can't "learn the lesson that technology is bad", you simply acquire his prejudices and fears.
That doesn't have much to do with "free speech" per se; there are many ways in the US that saying the wrong thing can cost you money. Just like anything else, if you harm someone without cause or justification, they can recover damages from you. That isn't automatically an infringement of free speech rights. The major factor that makes speech non-free in Europe is the various restrictions on speech in European criminal law. You can face fines or prison in Europe for something you say even though no individual can necessarily demonstrate specific harm or damages, on the theory that some speech is intrinsically undesirable for society.
But civil law can also create restrictions on free speech if it creates such legal uncertainty that it causes people to interfere with legitimate free speech. The question is: will the civil law interfere with legitimate criticism. In the US, civil liability works in such a way that it doesn't do so; you only face liability if you deliberately and maliciously harm someone else. In Europe, you can face liability even for legitimate criticism, and now, even third parties may face liability for such criticism and be used as aids in restricting legitimate free speech.
Where do you think these batshit crazy ideas come from in the first place? Not the US...
It's not "spreading" when you observe it where it originated.
Yeah, sorry, that should have been an "... or ..."
You can kill yourself with a modern car if you leave it running overnight in the garage and fall asleep doing so.
Your wife can't use a stick?
You're deaf? I mean, the other alarm will keep going.
I don't have interaction with my detectors, except for replacing them every 5-10 years, which is faster than changing a light bulb.
I'm not so sure about that. People get better through practice. While that lane holding system keeps grandma on track most of the time, without practice, she may then completely fall apart when she can't use it. And your girlfriend may be less likely to harm a bumper when parking, but she may end up blocking the parking garage exit because she can't figure out how to get her car pointed the right direction. The more you automate simple tasks, the more you deprive people of being able to practice in simple situations that they can actually still handle. And while for many skills that may not matter, for driving I think it does.
That's exactly what it's about. And you must know how to do that. Sooner or later, you'll have to back up through a narrow passage to make room for an emergency vehicle or because your way is blocked. It doesn't happen frequently but it does happen. In different words, if you aren't able to easily back out of wherever you drove in, you shouldn't be driving at all. And the skills you require for backing out are pretty much the same skills you require for parallel parking.
You're mistaken about what licenses can and should accomplish. They are not a perfect indicator of people's ability to drive, they are merely a simple check to weed out some fraction of people who obviously shouldn't be on the road right now.
That's all I care about too. For example, you may get stuck in a narrow one-way street and have to back out of it. You may need to merge into a slowly moving tight stream of traffic. There are a lot of situations that are enough like parking that if you can't park you can't do them well, and where you end up creating a hassle or a hazard for other people. So, if you automate parking, you give people the illusion that they are prepared for traffic even though they aren't.
The problem isn't that there is anything wrong with automating parking per se, it's that the ability to park (parallel or otherwise) is one important indicator of your road-readiness.
And obvious response, but not quite right. Arguably, if you lack the skills to park, you shouldn't be driving in the first place. In different words, self-parking is fine when it goes with self-driving cars, but it isn't fine when it goes with drivers that are expected to be able to drive in complex and tight situations.
Propane is used in RVs and trailers; regular homes use natural gas, which is mostly methane. The big gas heaters usually go in the garage (where you can put one CO detector, mostly for the car). If you manage to kill yourself with CO from burning methane, I think you deserve an entry in the record books. The thing you have to worry about with natural gas is leaks, but you smell those.
Check Home Depot. You can get a talking smoke/CO detector (if you really think you need the CO) for $30. You disable it by pushing the big fat button right in the middle. These days, smoke detectors are as simply as buying it, sticking it to the ceiling, and replacing it every 10 years. The Nest, with its requirement for wiring and WiFi setup seems needlessly complicated (and also needs replacement every 10 years).